Monday, July 16, 2007

I could have made a pun in the title of this post, something which I am really not above, but this time it just didn't seem like it would be fun.

ABC and its cable cousin, ABC Family have begun showing a series about college/fraternity life called Greek. Now, I know that the subject of college life has been almost stripped down to the bone by countless movies and to a lesser extent, television shows, but there was something refreshing about this new short series that I just can't put my finger on. Now, if you have the first episode of the show recorded for future viewing, there may be spoilers in this entry just so you know.

The series has all the major groups for this kind of drama: the geeks, the elite fraternity/sorority and the bad (read FUN) fraternity, and the personal dynamics of the characters looks like it will be entertaining. It centers on geeky freshman Rusty, who is trying to escape his nerdish high school experience by joining a fraternity and forging a bond with his older sister Casey who doesn't want to have anything to do with him. Turns out that she hadn't even told the people she went to school with that she even had a brother. Now that's cold.

Casey is one of the most popular girls at the fictional Cyprus-Rhodes University. She dated the president of the two fraternities that her brother is interested in joining. Her old boyfriend, Cappie is the president of Kappa Tau, the fun, Animal House-type fraternity on campus and her current boyfriend is Evan, the president of the elite Omega Chi and together they are considered, as the ABC site puts it, campus royalty. And there are the various secondary characters that populate a college-themed story... roommates, frat/sorority brothers and I assume a couple of romantic interests for the young Rusty.

You will also notice that I haven't mentioned any of the actors' names and that is because most of the coverage of this show has centered on the pedigree of a single person, and I didn't think that was fair, as it is an ensemble.

Now, it is a rare thing for me to cheer at something a character does in a pilot episode, because at the time I don't really know them and I have nothing invested in their struggles and life, but there was a scene in the first episode of Greek that elicited that response from me. And after I cheer, well, I am sort of obligated to give the series at least a few more episodes before I rip into its minor shortcomings. Granted, it is only 10 episodes, so I may not even have a chance to criticize if it goes bad. I am looking forward to seeing where this goes, though I have a few ideas from this first episode of the direction it is going.